Strike Blocked, Central Michigan U. and Faculty Will Bring Labor Dispute to Fact Finder

The simple response for the union is to work-to-contract.   Do only what is contractually obligated, nothing more, nothing less.   Don’t show up a minute early, or leave a minute late.   If you are not required to do something, don’t.   If there are rules, follow them to the letter, and re-check to make sure that everything is being done correctly.  If there are mistakes, stop and wait until the problem has been fixed.

I saw something recently about some problems that US Air pilots were having, but they were not able to strike.  They followed the rules.   Apparently one rule requires that the pre-flight breakfast for pilots include toast.   When one pilot did not receive toast with his breakfast, he sent it back, delaying the flight.  Not necessarily customer-friendly, but his following the contract to the letter caused US Air some difficulties.

Probably because the legislature of the Sovereign State of Michigan passed a law to that effect.

Great way to live your life.  And if the employer also follows to the letter of the law, then students will doubly suffer.  This goes against everything we claim to provide students and the greater goal of knowledge and truth.  Imagine taking this approach to our research!

This is the case in many a state, not merely in Michigan.

@chronicle-363a0b063048d91386d758c10675ddd4:disqus, very good and thought causing questions.  Thank you.

The piece raises several questions, at least for me:

Is it the case that shortly after WWII with the generous GI Bill of the times that the mass production model for lower level courses became normative?

Did the discussions about this change to education parallel the ones we are seeing today regarding the same principles with different methods?

Is Oxford alone or only a rara avis in its successful use of a tutorial
teaching model? I found several interesting articles searching for
“oxford tutorial system” which answered this at least by
indicating Queens University in Belfast uses the method so there must
be others.

Are there other models worth investigating? e.g. St. Johns of Annapolis and Santa Fe perhaps.

Are honors programs at universities an attempt to rectify problems with the increasingly overwhelming sizes of lecture halls in lower level courses?

Depending on the answers to these and many other questions there may be models of future education that are not so dire. Constructing one such may raise some other questions:

If budgets remained constant (relative to cost of living) for universities, and if many lower level courses were transferred to online courses from masters teaching centers, would not the teaching work load on
professors diminish and the chances for tutorials and research expand considerably?

Could we start to dispense with highly paid administrators whose function is to attest to funding institutions that they are constantly and repetitively prating to faculty about class sizes, relevance and ‘productivity’?

  Or, could we offload that function of administrators to YouTube and have
  administrators start to wonder about the traditions of scholarship and
  higher level research?

What would be the effects of revamping honors programs to be only tutorials for far fewer students, perhaps differently selected than simply those who are GPA performers?

Alternatively, if a major university has an honors program, should it not also be experimenting with a tutorial model?

What are the methods of using this disruptive technology to return us to the Elysian days [sic] of the pre-GI Bill traditions of education and research as documented in the Indiana Jones works [sic]?

By asking these questions in this forum, am I asking for crowd sourcing?

Shouldn’t the DSM IV include hyperbolic fantasies about technology as a disorder?  These people are certifiably nuts. 

That’s more than a bit unfair and perhaps misses a great deal of evidence for how specifically technology is disrupting one industry after another. I suppose if one were to take your position, then we would have to believe that the “university” as an archetype was so sufficiently different from other forms of human interaction that it could somehow avoid the disruptive forces that have torn apart other industries. Or perhaps your view is that universities occupy a unique moral position within society that recommends a different approach and makes them deserving of salvation in the face of this disruption. Either could make for interesting discussions.

The Stanford online AI course had a very poor success rate – I think only 20% succeeded. The new course that is supposed to be teaching introductory programming by building a web search system moves so fast that only students with prior background in computing are going to be able to keep up. I don’t see any of my current intro students succeeding in that course!  I don’t think these are models for replacing university CS programs, at least not as they are currently set up. I have already tried teaching programming online, and found it exceedingly difficult, more difficult than many other subjects. Students tend to need a lot of one-on-one coaching in the introductory CS courses.

This very intriguing conversation  looks at the university as a sort of teaching factory, which in a way it is. And factories are always being updated. But what about the concept of medieval collegialism? In the future, will teachers be confined to their cells — or computer cubicles — like some extreme monastic order? How will we interact and cooperate with our colleagues on the personal level? Will be there a Digital Commons Room and High Table? No more Professorial Give & Take?   No more intellectual friction?

There are elements of St. John’s College (Annapolis and Santa Fe) to be admired. However, the curriculum is ossified, the faculty are disconnected from the outside world, and the students become proficient in analysis but handicapped in synthesis. It is beautiful in its monasticism, not a model to be duplicated blindly.

Oh, please.  The sky is not falling, Chicken Little. Those who crow about the obsolescence of modern universities are choosing (think about it–choosing) to ignore centuries of history.  I’m not ignorant of the evolutionary steps that will probably be taken, but an intelligent university (certainly not the kind envisioned by Mr. De Millo or his minions) is deliberative and economical in its action–by training.  What kind of second rate academic is it that takes or advocates taking a step on impulse, trying to guess “where the market takes” higher education?  Why must higher education be taken anywhere?  While positive change is always welcome, what about higher education is so absolutely deplorable that it has to change fundamentally?  This ridiculous and startlingly perpetual argument ad futurum is nauseating.  What would the problem be if higher education continued to do well what it does well, adding change as it becomes apparent that it will work.  This desire to leap into bed with online interface, with its huge promises to reach the starving masses appeals, I’m sure, to someone whose thinking stops there.  The overwhelming and mounting evidence of online education’s weaknesses–one would think–would cause us not to abandon the idea altogether, but at least to be a smidge less apocalyptic.  For heavens sake, we’re trained in critical thinking!  What is critical, wise, or even smart about dropping a system that has served humanity pretty well for quite some time?  Who is served by the stultifying and willing ignorance of people who choose to deny the problems with online education?  Why is higher education, which ought to be a nail in a sure place,  allowing itself to be dragged around the dance floor by this reeling drunk of a dance partner that doesn’t know where its going, let alone how it will all end up?  Why are we allowing the procrusteans like Mr DeMillo to cut off our feet to fit a market-based bed?  Why would Mr DeMillo want to damage and possibly kill a body that needs attention, not destruction?  The religious zeal with which many attack higher education is the very reason higher education must continue to exist in its current form–to combat the bad thinking that is not only published, but applauded as “revolutionary” or “visionary.”  We ignore the quality of the revolution or vision at our peril.  To become a bunch of credentialist automatons is to capitulate to the impulses of the short-sighted and the intellectually stunted.  Credentialism is slavery.  Go and be slaves where you will, but leave the liberating arts alone.

There’s my rant.  I disagree with Mr. DeMillo.

 Very nicely put.  I can see it now: my face on a big-screen (that’s scary no matter what the context), students across the world sitting and listening–hanging on every word, and there I am just letting it wash over me.  It almost seems nefarious when I think about it in light of your comment, and the advocates of this model would have us accept them as some kind of egalitarian benevolence.  I retract my opening line.  This is not nicely put, it’s kind of horrifyingly incisive, but in a good way, because I’ve seen into the dark heart of the beast.

 I do not see research being threatened.  I didn’t get that from this article at all.  I understood that there are a percentage of courses that could be scaled and made available to a larger number of students.  The idea of colleges turning into ‘distribution nodes’ is kind of interesting.  Either way, someone is going to have to do research.  How will the ‘masters’ continue to exist without research?

The model may have to evolve a little, researchers may have to tweak how who they work for/with, but overall I don’t perceive their demise. 

The availability of these massive courses for particularly popular courses would only serve to expand the availability of that particular course.  There will always be a need traditional courses, there are courses that just don’t work in an online setting.  So there will need to be an institution for those courses.  Where there is an institution there’s research.  

That’s how I understood it.

 Why, because they didn’t work for you?  What evidence do you have that these are toxic traditions?  I teach two hundred or so students a term (thanks to two huge general education sections), and the vast majority of them benefit from what you think are toxic traditions?  Are you absolutely certain you are in the majority you believe yourself to be in?

 I’m not sure where you are coming from with the last statement, but it’s accurate.  Universities do, actually, occupy a unique moral position within a society, and that position does, indeed, recommend a different approach.  The problem with universities is that they are embracing the disruption, and even perpetuating it by placing Clay Christensen clones in positions of administrative power.  Applying disruptive models to education implies that we are thinking of higher education as a wheel, and rather than try to improve the wheel we want to throw out the shape because its a stupid, old tradition that everyone just accepts.  All I’m asking for is that we weigh the evidence, debate the value, and move improvingly forward before we just say that higher education is a failure and try to abandon it for vocational training in the servile arts.  So, if you meant that with some irony, I’m not sure I’m convinced.  If just a declarative statement of possible view-point.  I agree that it needs to be discussed further.

Stephen: You write, “Either way, someone is going to have to do research.”  I’m not sure what you mean.  It’s true that the article doesn’t say, “we won’t need research.” But the point I was trying to make is, who’s going to pay for it? Right now, we have a system where university professors teach (in part) to support themselves as researchers.  But if you eliminate all the teaching positions in favor of scaled up master teachers, then where will the jobs come from?  Thus, “there will always be traditional courses” and “where there’s an institution there’s research” seems funny to me.  The  whole drift of this logic is: 1) blow up “inefficient” local institutions; 2) have more people taught by the “best”; 3) save money by closing down the rest. And I guess my point is, can we really expect research to survive, alongside other things we take for granted from our current college set up, in this new environment?  I wonder if you aren’t confusing the moral desirability of research — and assuming it will just be — with the practical reality of what happens when the economic basis underlying it is destroyed.

In general, I grow frustrated with the “massive efficiency” crowd’s inability to talk about the future of the whole of university life, or how it will be sustained in the future.

Beautifully put.  I especially enjoy the notion that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.  Why are administrators not willing to take jobs as cogs in some machine somewhere, allowing some great centralized administration to just post instructions online that all colleges, in whatever form, can then follow.  This is a big money saver, since most of the money spent on administrators is wasted anyway in meetings, long and boring presentations, and exorbitant travel budgets.

 Evidence, even though anecdotal, is always welcome, and always stunts the bloated claims of the futurity crowd.  I appreciate that your observations undermine the ad futurum fallacy that drives this movement.

1.  Universities developed the Internet technologies that opened up the opportunity for students and faculty to access this power “anytime, anywhere”.  Most are still trying to determine where to use it.

2.  The “for-profits” leveraged this resource and created billions of dollars in market. cap.

3.  College profs sold their intellectual property by authoring textbooks–the Stanford Coursera
model allows the profs to sell their course with the textbook.I expect this “cyberprof” movement will accelerate leading to the early stages of a renewal of the “virtual university” movement staffed by top profs.

jwr12, I think you hit the nail directly on the head with your comments. But, don’t discount the possibility that some might have a hidden business plan. As one of the final comments — “Social networks become extremely important if you’re going to do this
stuff at scale, because one professor can’t deal with 100,000 readers.
He has to have a network of trusted people who would be able to answer
questions.” — makes clear, such courses will need laborers to supplement the limited labor of the “master.” It seems to me that the technology evangelicals assume that this “supplemental” labor will come from one of 4 places:

1) computers programmed with some version of AI
2) people — whether they be students or interested professional scholars — who donate their time to businesses a la contributors to the Huffington Post
3) low-paid online workers in India
4) adjuncts

As you perceptively note, at some point the supply of 2 will dry up, leaving low-quality contributions from AI, or low-quality jobs for 3 and 4. All 4 of these options simply continue elite policies of sucking wealth away from the vast majority of the globe’s population and leaving us all the poorer for such myopic decisions.

I do that! Push two buttons on your smart phone and there I am in Hi-Def. And there is my screen of friendly Java simulations to demonstrate the Central Limit Theorem, then screen switches back to Excel and Minitab statistical analysis work manipulated live from real, relevant data cases, then back to a screen of summary point on my PowerPoint show (downloadable from the course website, so students never have to take notes and my own self-authored textbook that is also downloadable), a list of learning outcomes designed to be measured for accreditors and tested at the college 24-7 on-campus cheat-proof testing center. Is this as good as “face-to-face” traditional instruction? Of course not! It’s demonstrably much, much better, because the U.S. higher education model had never worked before (excepted for us tenured faculty).

So you’re defending “interaction” as the poor man’s “mentoring.” And what does such interaction constitute, pray tell? The Socratic Method? Prof. Kingfield’s intimidations of Paper Chase? Donald Sutherland’s lecture in Animal House? Or one of the following –
1. “Any questions?”  (no response)
2. “What’s gonna be on the test?”
3. Wasting class time for questions that single students confused about while everyone else sits there bored.
4. Engaging a few students in provocative discussions that the rest of class won’t participate in, unless you are one those who has “required participation” as a portion of the grade.

To those who defend the classroom lecture-interaction model, I love to ask:
1. Have you developed a set of lesson plans of what students will be able to do after each unit?
2. Have you designed a set of measurable learning outcomes and evaluation instruments (quizzes, papers, presentations, etc.) for students to demonstrate satisfactory performance?
3. What does passing your course mean, in terms of #2 above?
4. What percentage of students will perform at or above 80% on these learning outcomes?
5. Have you ever been videoed and critiqued and mentored by a master teacher?

If you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, then you are clueless about real education and learning. It’s easy to retreat behind “critical thinking” and “being exposed to” and “learning to appreciate” and “I know it when I see it” rationalizations of why students aren’t as good as they used to be.

I am currently taking a blended learning MA in Learning and Technology. The online coursework is more intensive than anything I did face-to-face at the undergrad level. I learn more from my colleagues during online discussions, forums and collaborative projects than I learn from the instructor (of course, it IS a grad program and we ARE already professionals). Our “prof” is a facilitator and the best courses naturally have the best facilitators. It ain’t easy being a great facilitator – way more work than for a f2f course IMO.Nonetheless, I am firmly sold on online learning, NOT as a replacement of the traditional university, but as a new form of learning. They are different beasts. WHEN they are well-designed, online courses work exceedingly well at the time-starved grad level. Great content coupled with great presentation skills will definately allow many profs to form their own “institutions.” Universities better wake up to this fact soon because my children’s generation definately gets this idea. Tomorrow’s profs will have online channels and they may very well be free-lancing it if they have the required skills.

 This is definitely on the right track.  But “…and tested at the college 24-7 on-campus cheat-proof testing center…” I just cram 24 hours before the exam by studying your previous year exams (posted online by others), text messaging with others who have already taken the exam, and what do I learn? How to cram and cheat.

Assessment is still a very big problem with online education.  While you’re certainly on the right track, these assessments sound like your weakest link (and tend to be the weakest link of others).

Once again a partial discussion about the disruption of higher ed by the internet (and associated technologies).

I say partial because it is completely ignoring some significant factors affecting the course of unfolding “catastrophe-in-higher-education”. (Or crisis, or tipping-point, or paradigm shift – pick your favourite cliche>)

What people are referring to as the ‘traditional’ model doesn’t just include the structured curriculum, the campus and one-to-many pedagogy – it also includes the idea of the cohort and the calendar.

Disruption to the cohort and the calendar has not really got going yet – it’s starting but it’s early days.

The removal of cohorts and academic years from higher education is, in turn, a pre-requisite to the second issue this article fails to consider: the possibility, likelihood and effect of separating learning and accreditation. 

When learning is a race to the end of semester, traditional education has significant advantages over the so-called “disruptive models”. Because that is the situation for which it was developed and for which it is optimised.

Secondly, the article (and most of the comments) completely ignores the role of professional association and governmental regulatory bodies in the control (including quality control) of education attainment. Moreover, these kinds of organisations do not operate in isolation from each other or higher education. They have, in fact, long standing close relationships with higher education.

The ownership of authority is far more resistant to changes in the pedagogical methods or business models driven by changes in technology. (And research acts, though many mechanisms, as a brake on challenges to the ownership of authority in ‘traditional’ institutions – another factor not really bothered with in the article.)

I am not contradicting the starting point of the article. Higher education is undergoing radical change as a result of technological change – both at the level of its practices, and its underlying economics. There is enough change to warrant a discussion about the possibility of widespread “platform collapse” in higher education.

It is not however a case of Amazon versus Borders. 

Books and readers are a little like course materials and students.

Authors are a little like educators.

Publishers and editors are a little like universities and examiners.

The best-seller list is nothing like a curriculum review committee or a professional accreditation working party.

Getting value from a book (as a commodity) is nothing like getting value from an education (as a commodity).

Societies need for well read citizens (yes there is one) is nothing like its need for qualified professionals capable of doing their jobs.

Researchers are also quite a bit like authors. But societies need for new knowledge and practical solutions to longstanding or urgent problems is nothing like its need for an enjoyable read. 

And the institutions required to produce the next generation of researchers is nothing like the institutions required to produce the next generation of authors.

The object of reading a book is not becoming capable of writing the book. The reader need not assimilate the contents of the book into his or her memory, skills, judgement and abilities. Quite the opposite in the case of an education.

Borders versus Amazon is an appallingly shallow and useless analogy that significantly writes down the reality of higher education institutions and the changes they are navigating.

I think the professors in the article are right that assessment-based, or competency-based, credit will be the wave of the future for many students and courses.  The competency involved might be learned in a very-large-scale course, regular course, online or by book learning, but having the competency is more important than how it was learned.  Many students can learn very effectively in that context. 

MIT’s new MITx institution claims software that can grade essays, and if that technology works out, it certainly could automate many large-scale assessments.

Students used to complain about being in a lecture hall with 300 other students, so I wonder how pleased they will be in a class of 150,000, in the long term. 

Although there is a new and powerful wave of technology, I think a lot of the forces that created the present are still there.  Universities are ‘the way they are’ today partly because there are a lot of students who need the time and structure they provide, and if America is still going to add hundreds of thousands of students to the undergraduate pipeline every year then the system is going to have to be able to deal with a lot of different kinds of students.  One size-fits-all-very-large-scale course systems may not really be able to do the heavy lifting educational futurists believe if they run out of self-selected students and begin to get regular students.  But how large a share of the market for starting undergraduates will they absorb? Will it be enough to deconstruct much of the institution of higher education as we know it today, as the professors think? 

Bart Schuster
OnlineGraduateSchool.tripod.com/education.htm
Twitter.com/arrive2_net

funInSun34: Assessments truly are the weakest link; in most educational scenarios. I’m a Draconian proponent of “if you can’t make the burger, you don’t keep the job” but I also realize that there are many ways for a student to demonstrate effective synthesis of the material. If the students aren’t going to work towards that synthesis, then I invite them to leave the class.

thanks – I’m going to use portions of your reply in my meeting next week. I really appreciate your perspective.

“Tomorrow’s profs…” …. some of us already are free-lancing it. But it has its downsides too.

Darcity, you are bang on! Assessment can be MUCH better in an online course than traditional f2f IF it is done properly as per your example. The people who don’t understand this are the people who haven’t created and/or taught a well-designed online course. Period. 

You don’t get it. Many of the 150,000 students will be interacting with each other which will in turn richly add to what they initially learned from the Master. A much better model for rich, motivating and interactive learning than learning how to fall asleep in a traditional one-way transmission of content course with no student-prof interaction as is the case in all first year university lectures at least! There is WAY MORE interaction in a massive online course than in a massive lecture hall. I would guess you haven’t taken any large-scale online courses. I have. Read the book before you judge it…

Seriously, sure, you can deliver all kinds of content to hundreds of thousands or even millions of people simultaneously.  That’s called “mass media.”  No kidding.  Assessment and evaluation is exactly the point.  Universities don’t just disseminate content.  They assess student performance.  That’s why we need smaller classes.  Oh, yeah, and they actually -teach-.  One person teaching another is very different from one person getting impersonal content from another.  

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“Another thing we’re looking at is the development of a value index to try to calculate, to be vulgar, the return on investment.” What’s “vulgar” is this ignorant characterization of “return on investment.” Considering the cost of higher education and the unconscionable amount of debt that young people with little or no financial experience undertake to acquire it, there had better be a return on their investment. What is vulgar is the yearly rise in the price of tuition in excess of inflation, which colleges and universities know they can charge because student loans will pay for it. Frankly I think a great many of the courses of study offered by our institutions of higher education simply aren’t worth it.

I’m in the middle of running a course about how to prepare English teachers in schools in Sweden for the new Swedish syllabus for English which appeared in July. Teachers, of course, find it very difficult to ‘escape’ from the classroom for days and weeks at a time to study a course like this at university … and yet it’s clearly very valuable for them.

My student group consists of people all over the country (think ‘area of the State of California’) and is evenly split between teacher trainees at various other universities than my own and serving teachers who usually come in from their classrooms after the pupils have gone home.

One of them is a really interesting ‘case study’, though. She’s a full-time student at the University of Stockholm (about 450 kms away from where I work), but this winter she took out her student loan, rented out her flat and moved to the beach in Thailand, where her money goes much further … and the weather’s better, of course. She’s got this course accredited by Stockholm and there’s a Swedish Study Centre near where she lives in Thailand, which provides both first-class internet connections and the kind of careers counselling service you’ll find at any university.

We meet via Adobe Connect a couple of times a week … and she hasn’t missed a class yet.

I think that this is the way things are going …

This idea seems to be fundamentally flawed, for what education truly stands for. What makes education necessary within a democratic society is the idea of bringing together various approaches, ideas, perspectives and backgrounds into the learning process, not just a few “master” perspectives. Just think for a moment of the narrow focus that comes along with one “master teacher”. Yes, it would be cheaper to have one professor teach 50,000 students in an introductory course, but you risk choking off creativity and the integration of diverse experiences into education, which is really what education is all about–the merging of diverse people, knowledge, perspectives and ideas. 

There is a reason why some of the most intelligent people in Silicon Valley send their children to traditional institutions of education that discourage the idea of online learning and forcing iPads into the hands of students. They understand that the medium in which knowledge is delivered is just as important as the knowledge itself. Again, it would help institutions save a lot of money by having students slumped down in a chair in front of a screen hoping for engagement within the learning process, but anyone that has worked with students, at any level, knows that this is just not the case. 

Institutions of education will have to adapt there is no question about this. But, if you honestly believe that traditional education has no place in the future and that the fundamental core of education is going to be eradicated by online classrooms and “master teachers”, you know nothing about education. 

How about another bookstore analogy – Barnes & Noble?  While I might like to learn from a master, I value the interaction and what I can learn from fellow students as well.  It is true many are growing up in an internet community, but it still isn’t a replacement for the real thing…in person.

Nothing new: perhaps one option could be to fund Higher Education just as people agree to fund police and fire departments – necessary (but decrease administrative bloat at universities such as mine, Sonoma State, to make this more palatable!).
Then allow anyone/everyone to attend, in person or online? (Let the market decide which the public decide which model they prefer…?)

I participated in Sebastian Thrun’s online AI course and I can attest that the results were fantastic. This does not demonstrate that online education should replace f2f education; what I saw very clearly is that sound pedagogy works quite well regardless of the medium and that is where this course excelled. By explaining complex concepts one at a time, providing clear examples and doing immediate verification of the understanding via quizzes, the instructors achieved an effectiveness in teaching that surpass anything I have experienced in over forty years of experience as a university student and teacher. Their office hours were much more effective than any f2f version I have ever seen.
There is no question that new technologies make feasible teaching models that did not exist before and, yes, effective online learning is one of them. But adoption of these new models does not have to imply the demise of universities as we know them. 
A discussion that I don’t see taking place is how we as a society should view education. A lot of people talk about financial responsibility and the inevitability of scaling down due to the lack of funds but little is said about the strategic value of education to keep the country in a position of world leadership. Why is it that most people do not object to spending trillions of dollars for two wars that the country cannot afford at the same time that they preach restraint on education expenses? Does anyone believe that the country is better off having borrowed trillions from China to finance two wars while the education system nationwide is being deconstructed? The accounting acrobatics that were used to hide the war expenses could very well be used to finance education for if the rationale that military strength is paramount who could argue against the strategic relevance of education? 
Research and teaching go hand in hand but we all know that there is no conventional “business case” for a lot of research. Yet without it the future of the economy is in serious doubt. We need to look at education as an investment, not an expense. It is the foundation that will sustain the well being of the nation for generations to come and universities should have all the necessary funding to try various models without putting their very existence at risk as if they were some kind business start-up.

Perhaps the reason why “only” one-in-five graduates earned a liberal arts degree** is because most students were never given the opportunity to do a liberal arts degree in the first place? Which may be related to the rapid expansion of higher education in the 20th century having had a more vocational than liberal arts nature? Which, in turn, may have something to do with high quality liberal arts programs not scaling well, precisely because they involve a low student-teacher ratio?

In other words, perhaps the failures many perceive in higher education currently are the result of those implementing the last great expansion and modernization of higher education turning away from the wisdom of centuries in favor of more trendy (not to mention market driven and, especially these days, cost efficient) approaches. The infamous introductory lecture courses with hundreds of students are not a common feature at traditional liberal arts institutions, but rather at the more vocational training-style universities, especially public universities and colleges, with their (ever increasing) emphasis on pushing as many students through as cheaply as possible.

It is worth noting, I think, that the incredible popularity of the recent free online Stanford courses was in no small part due to their being *Stanford* courses. If there were no Stanford (a, shock, horror, liberal arts university with “a virtually unrivaled 6.4:1 student-to-faculty ratio where approximately 75% of classes have 15 students or fewer” and only 78 out of 1568 undergraduate courses had 100 or more students in Fall 2011), there wouldn’t have been 150,000 people caring enough to sign up for one course. Indeed, I expect most of the online students would have much preferred the opportunity to attend the class in person on campus, if they could have.

Traditional universities are in no danger from online courses (or online universities). Such courses, when done well (and preferably offered for free, as Stanford did) are not a replacement for traditional universities, but rather a way to expand learning opportunities to people who otherwise would have no access. This is a Very Good Thing, but should not be confused for something it simply is not.

**I’m accepting this statistic for the sake of argument, but from your wording, I’m not sure it is an accurate tally. A liberal arts degree is not determined by major subject, but rather by the educational philosophy and approach of the educational institution.  (“Liberal Arts” and “Humanities” are not synonyms.)

I am a retired Higher Education Administrator and I have returned to College to obtain a second Masters degree in Healthcare Administration at the University of Scranton. From my perspective and experience, on-line courses are OK but the interaction with other students is an important part of the education process. Most students will be employed in organizations where teamwork is essential in solving problems, interacting with the community,  etc.etc.. Development of interpersonal skills is essential to success and I don’t see how obtaining an education sitting in front of a computer can assist in developing these skills. “Students teach Students”

Fascinating and a bit disheartening to see how much this discussion seems to be driven not by a hyper-capitalist mentality that is only concerned with a narrow definition “value” as a return on investment. But there are better examples than Borders, of course, that DeMillo and Baker are unable to see from their limited worldview.

I suspect if you look to the music industry, instead of the commercial bookselling industry, you’d find a better analogy for where the University system may end up. The “masters” of the recording and music industry have largely undermined their own mastery as a result of trying to protect and corner an ever greater market share…it is the inevitable collapse of a winner-takes-all system.

Online and brick-and-mortar in lieu of online v. brick-and-mortar

Sad, but a reality for college books stores.

If the case in education were truly what Mr. Lyttle describes above, the vast majority of our students would be receiving no education whatsoever.

In one sense, the Western tradition of the university has been around for about a thousand years.

In quite another sense, the tradition of the university as we find it in this country is less than a hundred fifty years old–arguably, only about 60 years old.

When I see historical tradition invoked as a protector for the university “as it is now,” I reach for my Browning. The facts are that the university has always been changing–slowly at first, as society changed, and then faster and faster (from the ecclesiastical model to the humanistic model to the classical studies model to the research university to the post-GI-bill school to the baby boomer model to the online model).

Those who would resist change today–often any change–don’t show a sense of historicity. Those who think that the university holds some sort of moral high ground don’t understand the corrupting, corrosive effect tenure has had. Those who fear the commodification of classes haven’t looked at the Lady Gaga and Simpson offerings. Those who think the university is “only” for one thing haven’t looked closely at their schools’ budgets. 

Social change, especially social change which is accompanied by technological change and economic change, can’t be held back from any given sector of society. John XXIII knew that, and take a look at what has happened to the most truly tradition-bound institution in the West tried to stand in the waters and command the tides since his reforms.

Those who would resist change in schools because it’s based on a “business model” fail to understand that the change is really based on organizational science and the needs and demands of a society that is quite different from 1100 AD, or 1550 AD, or 1785 AD, or 1870 AD, or 1945 AD, or 1966 AD, or even ten years ago.

Most of the commentators on this thread cannot even produce a convincing argument to the question of “what’s a school for.”

This is very important since almost all science and engineering majors are from foreign countries and they will no longer have to travel to the campus, except to teach the undergraduates in broken English as lecturers. This will also dramatically lower the cost and especially pension cost to provide the huge percentage of undergraduate remedial courses that are provided to those admitted via lower standards, who have not take the courses required fifty years ago. The Internet is especially effective automating the Socratic method of teaching, should it be in vogue again. As the official and unofficial Baby Boom passes and it is realized that college is not for everyone and credentialism, except in government, is shown to be a huge ruse, this will allow the second and third tier colleges to lower tuition and still keep it way above costs and paid by students taking out egregious federal loans. Techology to the rescue!

I think I understand the importance of research. However I question whether it should be the standard for all university professors. It seems to me that there are an awful lot of small  journals and small conferences that exist so that professors can get tenure by listing presentations and publications with them. These of course are not top tier publications or conferences but if universities only tenured people with sophisticated publications then most people would not get tenured.
In sum I think we need to de-link research from teaching as it is currently practiced. There must be a better model.

If the large lecture hall were the sole pedagogical method at a university, your argument would be devastating.  I’m not sure you’ll find a whole lot of people who will vigorously defend the large lecture hall–well, I *hope* we wouldn’t find that.

However, that is not the only, nor even the dominant pedagogical method in most places.  I teach classes to between 22 and 35 students.  I meet with all my first year students at least twice every semester in person, and many more times than that via email.  In classes, we do group work and student reports; they get a great deal of feedback from their peers as well.  Thus, we avoid many of the problems of the large lecture hall. 

Online assessments and instruction can be very effective–but they can also be very ineffective.  It’s not a magic bullet.  And it will require a great investment in technological infrastructure and instructor training that will not be cost-saving.  It will also be just as subject to the corroding influence of market demands as “traditional” instruction.  Consider that we’ve found a way to turn a system that depended on carefully-trained experts balancing self-governance, original research, and the education of students into the current university model, in which over half the instruction is now delivered by (generally carefully-trained expert) adjuncts who don’t enjoy similar job protections, professional opportunities, or compensation. 

If something so noble-minded as the traditional university system can turn into the exploitative machine that is modern higher education, do you really think that this new technological turn–which so often uses “market logic” as its logic–is going to be magically immune to the pressure to produce more with less, to undervalue its workers, and to monetize itself in every possible way?

The problem lies with a system in which getting into the workforce at all takes tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. I agree that it’s unfortunate to have to get only vo-tech and be “a cog” (unless and until one can save up and arrange to get additional education.) But is far worse to have to choose serious indebtedness for a lifetime or being stuck in only the very lowest rungs of the job ladder.

There needs to be SOME alternative for people who don’t have the cash up front for four years of not working and high tuition.

bcbailey64 – If you are in an online environment, your assessment has become limited to tests and writing assignments. While this is perfect for many programs, I find it hard to believe that those assessments are generally effective for courses in science or the Arts. Certainly some science and art programs are assessable online (graphic design, computer science), but most aren’t.Even assuming that students can be accurately evaluated by just testing and writing, how do you accomplish those evaluations in “A seminar room with 10,000 students, 50,000 students”? Suddenly you are limited to automated evaluation of multiple choice tests. Even if you could employee a legion of graders to evaluate writing assignments, how do you eliminate the subjectiveness that is inherent to that type of evaluation? As a student, if my writing assignment recieves a low score, I would simply re-submit (assuming re-submitting is acceptable) the same one hoping to get a more lenient grader.

A well-designed curriculum attempts to ensure that graduates have an adequate understanding of key concepts, methods, models and principles in a particular discipline. Already, we see too many students entering the university who do not have a broad enough base of understanding to be able to meet expectations during further studies (high school grads entering undergraduate school; bachelor’s degree holders attending graduate school). Too often, these students seem to have serious “holes” in their knowledge. If higher education evolved even further into a smorgasbord of (distance) offerings, what could employers expect of those who’ve taken only a sampling of courses that almost surely would not add up to mastering a discipline? There is certainly money to be made by offering courses in a piecemeal manner. But, will customers of that approach understand the ways in which they are shortchanging themselves and their career potential? Will the courses be offered with a caveat emptor disclaimer?

As someone who — not from any well-funded, upper-tier schools, but on a DIY low-tech basis — has been video-capturing my own course lectures (Critical Thinking, Intro to Philosophy, and Ethics so far) and uploading them to my Youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler/ )  — and who has been following these discussions about revolutionizing teaching and learning through technology for some time, I’ve got to say that I find some of these speculations a bit naive.

There’s no way one is going to “reach students on an individualized basis on a scale that is unprecedented,” if the scale is something like 150,000 students, or even a more modest 1000 — no matter what kind of “network of trusted people who would be able to answer questions” you build with it.  You’re not going to be able to do that in convergent fields where the interchange and education can arguably be reduced to putting up vids, progressive exercises, and answering questions — let alone in (what ought to be) a convergent field like Critical Thinking, where students often need much more individual, on-the-ground interaction in order to make scaffolded progress in developing skills, dispositions, and a reflective attitude.  Imagine trying that — or rather doing so successfully — in genuinely divergent fields.

The roughly 80 or so videoed lectures I’ve put up so far — which I embed into my classes’ course management system environments — get me anywhere from 1-5 serious questions/comments per week from people outside my official classes, people who want to engage, want to learn, to interact.  I often have to give these other students or lifelong learners all-too-brief answers and then get back to work on my own courses with the students I’m contracted to be teaching, or to my research, or to my reading, or to my own life.  To assist even one of my own students on an individualized basis demands quite a bit of time and attention, and often getting to know that student to some degree.

I’m, practically speaking, a nobody — and I get more interactions in my field than I can adequately address on an “individualized basis” just after offering my own class lectures/discussions for free, unpublicized.  Add some academic prestige in there — prestige typically earned, by the way, by putting in a lot of research and writing, which is very time consuming and which has to be kept up — and I would imagine the “teacher” is going to be deluged with student input and the beginnings of interactions, interactions which will, however, have to be shunted off to other teachers (and how again is this different than the big lecture hall with breakaway TA sessions?) or thrown into discussion forums (moderated by who, again?) or just ignored.

I suspect that these sorts of projects look very differently from the top down or from the outside than they do for those engaged in similar, though smaller scale work — the view from below, or from the proverbial “belly of the beast”. 

Don’t overlook an important aspect of this “revolution.”  Not everyone wants the same take on humanities courses.  Do you want Comparative Civilization, World, Global, or Western Civilization?  Do you want a course that reflects the biases of a single course author or do you want multiple perspectives on the same material?  Do you want indoctrination from the left or right?  [Don't tell me that this isn't an issue that matters to students/customers.]  I suspect that there is room for a wide variety courses in this new market, not just four or five master courses.

I did a quick word search on this article: “union”, “faculty association”, and “syndicate” and came up empty.  These words signify relevant factors in the issue addressed in this article.

Our brilliant Art schools in the 70s were dissolved into Polytechnics & then enormous University institutions. They struggled as a result to cope with the cost of Art & Design education. Very few quality courses exist as a result. There is now another bubbling revolution where courses are closing, Universities at risk of going broke. The Art School will be re-imagined, not via distant learning or computational systems but on a smaller scale, niche, intimate approaches to learning and yes that will include avante-garde, digital & new technologies but also with Educators, not researchers. 

As I posted elsewhere, if I was a literature student and I had the opportunity to take a massive online course with Salman Rushdie, I would jump at the opportunity. Now, if you are saying that Salman Rushdie is a fraud and I am not capable of learning something on value from him in this manner, I would have to state that you are wrong. Furthermore, massive online courses can not be replicated f2f. You can not cram 50,000 people into a classroom but you certainly can online. I would even be prepared to pay a hefty fee to take Salman Rushdie’s hypothetical course. So, it might not be your cup of tea but that doesn’t make it any less valid for thousands of others. My only suggestion would be to “try it.” You might like it! Isn’t life-long learning and curiosity and a sense of discovery what compelled you to get into education? This is IT.

The title of this article asks a profound and vitally important question for the future of our university system.  It is clear from articles like this and many, many others, particularly in the K-12 world (see Technology&Learning), that the answer is a disturbing ”yes.”  Teachers of young people, and the young people themselves, are embracing the technology and constantly looking for innovative ways to change the classroom experience, live and virtual.  At this point, defending the status quo is counterproductive and only delays responding to a new and exciting future in education.  When I told my wife, who is a florist, the statement by Mr. DeMillo that “I don’t know why anyone would think that the online revolution is about reproducing the classroom experience,” she said got a cold chill.  Even she knows change must come, and soon.  And there will be more collaborative ideas and solutions if we remember that “change for the future is not a criticism of the past.”

There are a number of terms thrown around in this piece that have meanings quite different from their usual meanings. Is the sole function of a “teacher” to transmit concepts clearly, or are there other elements to the teacher-student relationship that we’d expect from a “master teacher” (as opposed to what we’d expect from a well-written and engaging book, for example)?  Similarly, how can a person be a “mentor” to thousands of people with whom he or she has no direct interaction?   I certainly don’t understand how what’s described is either “individualized” or “intimate” instruction, as claimed in the interview. Not only is the concept “higher education” being re-defined, so are mentoring and teacher-student relationships when terms that have always implied personal communication and interaction between people have been gutted of that dimension.

In Through the Looking Glass, the following
exchange occurs:

 
“When I use a word,” Humpty
Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean,
neither more nor less.”

 
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you CAN make words mean so many different things.”

 
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be
master – that’s all.”

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